Tree removal credited for saving Palomar Mountain

PALOMAR MOUNTAIN -- It may have been more than simple luck that
saved the 309 homes, conference center, sixth-grade camp and
world-famous telescope on Palomar Mountain from the angry,
approaching flames of the Poomacha fire.

County officials, in a report released Thursday, attributed
firefighters' success in steering the Poomacha fire along the
southern ridge of Palomar -- just below mountaintop communities --
to a $52.5 million tree clearing project in the area.

"The fact that we cleared all those dead trees saved Mount
Palomar," said county Supervisor Bill Horn, in an interview.

George Lucia, chief of the Palomar Mountain Volunteer Fire
Department, said the effort gave firefighters safe places to make
stands. And the new clearings seemed to take steam out of the fire,
Lucia said.

"It was very vivid on East Grade below Crestline," he said.
"When the fire got in there, it just stopped. Had it gone through
there, it would have gone into a residential section."

The Palomar story is being held up by officials as a model, as
they push for more vegetation thinning programs in the wake of the
county's second firestorm in four years.

At the same time, mountain residents say they are under no
illusions that the new buffers will keep every Santa Ana
wind-driven inferno out -- particularly if one ignites on Palomar's
overgrown east slope.

"If a fire ever came up that side, we'd be in trouble," said
Linda Thorne, a retired biologist who has lived in a small cabin in
Palomar's Crestline subdivision for 35 years.

Rich Minnich, a geography professor at UC Riverside who studies
Southern California wildfires, said some of the region's thickest
brush lies in an 80-year-old chaparral stand to the east. And if it
isn't thinned, the brush will trigger a catastrophic fire one day
that could wipe out the entire forest on Palomar Mountain as the
Cedar fire did to Cuyamaca Rancho State Park in 2003, Minnich
said.

An overstocked forest

Anabele Cornejo, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Forest Service in
Rancho Bernardo, said federal officials haven't forgotten the east
slope. Cornejo said her agency plans to thin chaparral there this
winter by burning it -- in mild, moist weather.

Tom Brand, field officer for the Cleveland National Forest,
which includes public land on Palomar and many mountains in San
Diego and Riverside counties, said two sites are targeted: 1,500
acres along Highway 79 near Oak Grove and 1,900 acres midway
between Sunshine Summit and Warner Springs.

In the wake of the 2003 fires, however, federal officials' first
priority was to deal with the dead trees along evacuation routes
leading from the mountaintop communities.

The latest fires suggest a need to cut some smaller live trees,
too, Brand said, to prune back the forest to the way it was before
a century of aggressive fire suppression left it unnaturally
thick.

"A lot of people won't like that, but we'll have to do that to
open up the forest even more," he said. "We'll have dead and dying
forests if we don't remove some of the green. Our forests are
overstocked with too many trees and not enough water."